Along with the development and prevalence of the Internet, documents that describe address information as links to uploaded images and the like on the Internet are increasing. With the conventional technique, when document data that describes address information of a link destination is printed, that address information is normally printed as characters. Therefore, in order to print an image at the link destination, the user must independently access that image at the link destination by, e.g., clicking the address information and print it, resulting in troublesome operations.
On the other hand, a method that allows reception of home page data corresponding to a URL included in mail data together with the mail data upon reception of an e-mail message is disclosed (for example, patent reference 1 (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-216210)). With this method, since home page data is received together with mail data, the user need not re-establish connection to a provider upon accessing the URL described in that mail data, thus slightly reducing user's manual operations.
However, even when the method described in patent reference 1 is used, the user must independently access and print an image file received in addition to document data upon printing an image, thus requiring user's labor and time. In addition, a document and image are separately output as print data, resulting in inconvenience.